Web Design News

The client is a pharmacy in a relatively small but growing town where the market place is predominantly older people who aren’t necessarily afraid to search online for the local services they required.

The owner of the pharmacy wanted to be the first pharmacy in town to have a website and after some discussion with him we agreed on three guidelines for the site.

1. It had to be very user friendly.
2. It had to rank on the first page of Google for a number of important local terms
3. It had to engage people who came to the site and market the business through persuasion rather than pushing the pharmacy down the visitors’ throats.

Before we started to design the site we looked around to see what others had done and apart from websites belonging to large pharmacy chains we weren’t able to locate any local independent pharmacy in Australia with it’s own website.

So doing our very best Captain Kirk impersonation we forged ahead and developed a website for a pharmacy in Hervey Bay that our client is very happy with and Google is loving.

Here’s a little quote that should be imprinted on the brain of every person who thinks that they can design a content management system.

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created.

It comes from this post on Graywolf’s SEO Blog and the whole post is definitely worth reading.

On Friday we were approached by a potential client who wanted a quote to build a website and host a large amount of video for him and on Saturday we sat down with him to listen to his vision of what he wanted. It was soon clear that he had a great idea but was a bit uncertain about the technical details of how he would get his business online.

Fortunately for him we’ve had considerable experience in putting video online having worked with it back in the days when video on the Web was something new and exciting. Yesterday I sat down and wrote a primer for him that will help him understand what he needs to be looking for in hosting and the way he shoots video that is destined for the web.

It was good to be able to help him and it brought back a lot of memories of the fun and frustration we had working in the early days with video and webcams.

Today we’ll be writing a proposal for him to give him the costs involved in making his dreams come true.

Anyone who has read Toni’s and my ramblings in other places will know that neither of us are big fans of Google. Sure, we play their game and abide by their rules but that doesn’t mean we like them or that we would do a whole lot of mourning if they just went away. And if the history of the Internet is anything to go by then perhaps one day they will … but till that day comes we keep up-to-date on what’s happening with Google and the way they crawl web pages.

So it was interesting to see that on Friday Google announced that they have begun to crawl HTML forms. Now there is no guarantee that they’re going to index what they find at the other end because, in their words:

If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Google also undertakes not to crawl beyond any forms that require passwords or the entry of personal details and seeks to reassure webmasters by telling them that Googlebot is “ever-friendly” and is always a good Internet citizen … hmmm.

Google also says that Googlebot obeys “nofollow directives”. I must say that our experience of Googlebot in relation to nofollow has been a little different.

Google also claims that they can now crawl Javascript navigation and that may be so but we’re still seeing a lot of pages with Javascript navigation out there on the Web that have not been crawled or indexed despite having been online for a year or more.

I doubt that we’ll be using javascript navigation on any of our sites any time in the foreseeable future.

A couple of weeks ago the people behind a typical online Mom and Pop business approached and asked us to redevelop their site. Sales were very poor and they had built the original site themselves.

Throughout the redevelopment we had kept in touch with them and, as we do with all our customers, at the midway point we showed them what the new site looked like. Apart from a couple of very minor changes they seemed quite happy with the new look.

Yesterday, with the redeveloped site just two days away from going live, one of them rang the office and spoke to Toni. They weren’t happy, they thought we had missed the point when it came to marketing what they were selling and they suggested that we didn’t have any experience in selling anything online. They even pointed to a site we had built for another customer and suggested that it was way “too cold” to sell anything.

I suppose we could have suggested that they call the owner of that website and find out just how successful the site has been. We could have pointed to our car and told them how it had been paid for by the online sales we have made and continue to make via affiliate marketing and our own online shops. But in the end if a client suddenly loses faith in your ability to produce what they’re paying for then there’s only thing you can do … and that’s what we did.

The client was invited to come into the office today and pick up a full refund.

You win some and you lose some but as long as you learn from your loses things haven’t been a total waste of time.

Late Thursday afternoon Toni and I were getting ready to shut up shop for the Easter weekend. We were sitting here planning the stuff that we had to pack in the car to take on the trip to visit our grandkids in the next state when the phone rang.

It was one half of a husband and wife team who are employing us to do a little development and search engine optimisation on their website and the work was to start this week so I presumed the call was about the work we were to do … but it wasn’t.

Instead the call was about a minor change I had suggested that they make to their website before we even touched it. The change really was very minor … just the addition of three words but it had produced what the client considered was an amazing result. This couple had been trying to get their website up to the first page of Google for a term that was very important to them for months and they had not succeeded.

So they had come to us and that minor addition of just three words had lifted them right up to position five on the first page. The client was ecstatic and that’s what we aim for … clients who can see real value in the work that we do for them. It was definitely a great start to the Easter weekend for us.

It really doesn’t matter where you’re business is situated; if your website needs some search engine optimisation to get it onto page one of Google then call or email us to see if we can achieve the results you want. We can’t guarantee that just three words is all it’s going to take to get your website onto the first page of Google but we will give you an honest appraisal of what will need to be done.

Apart from web design, web hosting and copywriting we also do quite a bit of search engine optimisation work for our own clients both here in Hervey Bay and around the world. We also do quite a bit of SEO on a sub-contract basis for other web support businesses and it seems that our work is just as effective for them as it is for our own clients.

A little over two weeks ago we did some work for one of those web support businesses where we had to target 21 different keyword phrases. Yesterday they wrote to us about the work we had done for them.

Here are some rankings for xxxx. We already have some nice results. I am quite pleased with these fast results and rankings. It usually takes longer than this to see these kind of results.

It seems that in a highly competitive area we had achieved:

•  12 listings on the first page of the search engine results pages for those terms
•  7 listings on the second page
•  1 listing on the third page
•  1 listing on the fourth page

Of course we would like to see all of them on page one of the search engine results pages but 12 out of the 21 isn’t bad for some pages of a site that have only been live for two weeks.

If you need some quality search engine optimisation work done on your site then you know where to come

Orders for more work from established clients are always great to see. It tells us that our websites are definitely hitting the mark as far as the clients are concerned and that means we’re keeping our clients happy.

Hervey Bay Jet Ski was originally developed towards the end of last year and last week Daniel and Rosie came back to us to have some new 2008 jet ski models and quite a few new pages added too.

As any business grows so their website should grow too and to think of a website as being something that’s static can be a mistake. New products and new services  should all added into a webiste as they become available and that’s what we’ll be doing over the common months for Hervey Bay Jet Ski.

A couple of weeks ago I had to dive into the source code for a page on one of our own websites and nearly choked when I saw how rough the coding had been. It was something I’d done years ago and, while the page still rendered well in all the browsers. the coding was terrible.

Yesterday I ran into some more very very bad coding when a client asked me to give him a price on extending a site that had been built by another designer here in town. This designer had used a content management script that he had developed himself and, once again, the pages rendered quite well in the major browsers but the coding was aweful and the CSS was nothing like I had ever seen before. I’m not sure I have interpreted it correctly but it looked like it used a whole bunch of empty tags to position elements on the page.

So there’s some bad news instore for the client - extending this site is not going to be as cheap as he had hoped would be the case. Dreamweaver choked on the code and I doubt that I could make enough sense out of it to do anything by hand.

And there’s a lesson for any business looking for a web designer to build a site for them - make sure that you have a guarantee that everything that will be done for you can be worked on by any other web designer.

I see that Yahoo! has just been awarded a patent for a system that indexes one or more items of content by extracting one or more items of text that are then tokenized into one or more concepts.

In short, and cutting through all the techno-speak Yahoo! has found a way to index sites based on phrases that it might find on the pages contained within those sites. That’s something that Google has been doing for quite some time and they have a similar patent dating back to 2006

Ranking for phrases as well as keywords is something that we’ve been working with for quite some time and we seem to be achieving some very positive results for our clients. It’s good to see that another level of ranking pages has been added to another search engine.